An Investigation Into The Relationship Between English Learning Anxiety And Students’ Achievement:

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate into the relationship between English learning anxiety and students’ achievement. For this purpose 80 grade 10 [ten] students were randomly selected from Harakelo secondary school. The main instrument of data collection was foreign language classroom anxiety scale [FLCAS], developed by Horwtiz, Horwtiz and Cope [1986], and consisted of 33 items. It was administered to measure the students foreign language classroom anxiety level. The students document i.e. first semester English final examination result was used to determine the relationship between English learning anxiety and students’ achievement and observation checklist was prepared both for teachers and students to gather data about teacher related and student related provoke anxiety during the lesson. The data were analyzed using Descriptive statics to determine anxiety level, t- test to find out significance difference between boys and girls anxiety level and achievement and correlation coefficient was employed to determine the relationship between English learning anxiety and achievement were used to test the research questions. The results of the data analysis showed that majority of the students were found to be anxious with anxiety variables. Regarding gender there is no as such significance difference was seen between boys and girls with respect to English learning anxiety level. The finding further showed that there was a significant negative correlation between English learning anxiety and English achievement at the significances level of 0.0001. The study also found that there was achievement variation among the participants of the study with respect to their anxiety level. Thus it was found that although boy’s average result with respect to their test achievement is a little bit less than that of girls no significance difference was seen. The study also indicates that anxiety is a provoking factor among the subjects of the study and had a negative correlation between English learning anxiety and student’s achievement.